Global Inequality Essay

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Excerpts from: The Project Gutenberg eBook,

The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844,

by Frederick Engels, Translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/17306/pg17306.txt

Photos added.

INTRODUCTION.

The history of the proletariat in England begins with the second half of the

last century, with the invention of the steam-engine and of machinery for

working cotton. These inventions gave rise, as is well known, to an

industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil society;

one, the historical importance of which is only now beginning to be

recognised. England is the classic soil of this transformation, which was

all the mightier, the more silently it proceeded; and England is, therefore,

the classic land of its chief product also, the proletariat. Only in England

can the proletariat be studied in all its relations and from all sides.

Before the introduction of

machinery, the spinning and

weaving of raw materials was

carried on in the working-man's

home. Wife and daughter spun the

yarn that the father wove or that

they sold, if he did not work it

up himself. These weaver families

lived in the country in the

neighbourhood of the towns, and

could get on fairly well with

their wages, because the home

market was almost the only one,

and the crushing power of

competition that came later, with

the conquest of foreign markets

and the extension of trade, did

not yet press upon wages. There

was, further, a constant increase

in the demand for the home

market, keeping pace with the

slow increase in population and employing all the workers; and there was also

the impossibility of vigorous competition of the workers among themselves,

consequent upon the rural dispersion of their homes. So it was that the

weaver was usually in a position to lay by something, and rent a little piece

of land, that he cultivated in his leisure hours, of which he had as many as

he chose to take, since he could weave whenever and as long as he pleased.

True, he was a bad farmer and managed his land inefficiently, often obtaining

but poor crops; nevertheless, he was no proletarian, he had a stake in the

country, he was permanently settled, and stood one step higher in society

than the English workman of to-day.

So the workers vegetated throughout a passably comfortable existence, leading a

righteous and peaceful life in all piety and probity; and their material

position was far better than that of their successors. They did not need to

overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet earned what they

needed. They had leisure for healthful work in garden or field, work which, in

Family spinning and weaving in cottage

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itself, was recreation for them,

and they could take part besides

in the recreations and games of

their neighbours, and all these

games--bowling, cricket,

football, etc., contributed to

their physical health and vigour.

They were, for the most part,

strong, well-built people, in

whose physique little or no

difference from that of their

peasant neighbours was

discoverable. Their children

grew up in the fresh country air,

and, if they could help their

parents at work, it was only

occasionally; while of eight or

twelve hours work for them there

was no question.

What the moral and intellectual

character of this class was may

be guessed. Shut off from the towns, which they never entered, their yarn and

woven stuff being delivered to travelling agents for payment of wages--so shut

off that old people who lived quite in the neighbourhood of the town never went

thither until they were robbed of their trade by the introduction of machinery

and obliged to look about them in the towns for work--the weavers stood upon the

moral and intellectual plane of the yeomen with whom they were usually

immediately connected through their little holdings. They regarded their

squire, the greatest landholder of the region, as their natural superior; they

asked advice of him, laid their small disputes before him for settlement, and

gave him all honour, as this patriarchal relation involved. They were

"respectable" people, good husbands and fathers, led moral lives because they

had no temptation to be immoral, there being no groggeries or low houses in

their vicinity, and because the host, at whose inn they now and then quenched

their thirst, was also a respectable man, usually a large tenant farmer who took

pride in his good order, good beer, and early hours. They had their children

the whole day at home, and brought them up in obedience and the fear of God; the

patriarchal relationship remained undisturbed so long as the children were

unmarried. The young people grew up in idyllic simplicity and intimacy with

their playmates until they married; and even though sexual intercourse before

marriage almost unfailingly took place, this happened only when the moral

obligation of marriage was recognised on both sides, and a subsequent wedding

made everything good. In short, the English industrial workers of those days

lived and thought after the fashion still to be found here and there in Germany,

in retirement and seclusion, without mental activity and without violent

fluctuations in their position in life. They could rarely read and far more

rarely write; went regularly to church, never talked politics, never conspired,

never thought, delighted in physical exercises, listened with inherited

reverence when the Bible was read, and were, in their unquestioning humility,

exceedingly well-disposed towards the "superior" classes. But intellectually,

they were dead; lived only for their petty, private interest, for their looms

and gardens, and knew nothing of the mighty movement which, beyond their

horizon, was sweeping through mankind. They were comfortable in their silent

vegetation, and but for the industrial revolution they would never have emerged

from this existence, which, cosily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not

worthy of human beings. In truth, they were not human beings; they were merely

Gainsborough painting “The Cottage Door: 1778

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toiling machines in the service of the few aristocrats who had guided history

down to that time. The industrial revolution has simply carried this out to its

logical end by making the workers machines pure and simple, taking from them the

last trace of independent activity, and so forcing them to think and demand a

position worthy of men. As in France politics, so in England manufacture, and

the movement of civil society in general drew into the whirl of history the last

classes which had remained sunk in apathetic indifference to the universal

interests of mankind.

The first invention which gave rise

to a radical change in the state of

the English workers was the jenny,

invented in the year 1764 by a

weaver, James Hargreaves, of

Standhill, near Blackburn, in North

Lancashire. This machine was the

rough beginning of the later

invented mule, and was moved by

hand. Instead of one spindle like

the ordinary spinning-wheel, it

carried sixteen or eighteen

manipulated by a single workman.

This invention made it possible to

deliver more yarn than heretofore.

Whereas,though one weaver had

employed three spinners, there had

never been enough yarn, and the

weaver had often been obliged to

wait for it, there was now more

yarn to be had than could be woven

by the available workers. The demand for woven goods, already increasing,

rose yet more in consequence of the cheapness of these goods, which

cheapness, in turn, was the outcome of the diminished cost of producing the

yarn. More weavers were needed, and weavers' wages rose. Now that the

weaver could earn more at his loom, he gradually abandoned his farming, and

gave his whole time to weaving. At that time a family of four grown persons

and two children (who were set to spooling) could earn, with eight hours'

daily work, four pounds sterling in a week, and often more if trade was good

and work pressed. It happened often enough that a single weaver earned two

pounds a week at his loom. By degrees the class of farming weavers wholly

disappeared, and was merged in the newly arising class of weavers who lived

wholly upon wages, had no property whatever, not even the pretended property

of a holding, and so became working-men, proletarians. Moreover, the old

relation between spinner and weaver was destroyed. Hitherto, so far as this

had been possible, yarn had been spun and woven under one roof. Now that the

jenny as well as the loom required a strong hand, men began to spin, and

whole families lived by spinning, while others laid the antiquated,

superseded spinning-wheel aside; and, if they had not means of purchasing a

jenny, were forced to live upon the wages of the father alone. Thus began

with spinning and weaving that division of labour which has since been so

infinitely perfected.

While the industrial proletariat was thus developing with the first still

very imperfect machine, the same machine gave rise to the agricultural

proletariat. There had, hitherto, been a vast number of small landowners,

yeomen, who had vegetated in the same unthinking quiet as their neighbours,

the farming weavers. They cultivated their scraps of land quite after the

Spinning Jenny

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ancient and inefficient fashion of their ancestors, and opposed every change

with the obstinacy peculiar to such creatures of habit, after remaining

stationary from generation to generation. Among them were many small holders

also, not tenants in the present sense of the word, but people who had their

land handed down from their fathers, either by hereditary lease, or by force

of ancient custom, and had hitherto held it as securely as if it had actually

been their own property. When the industrial workers withdrew from

agriculture, a great number of small holdings fell idle, and upon these the

new class of large tenants established themselves, tenants-at-will, holding

fifty, one hundred, two hundred or more acres, liable to be turned out at the

end of the year, but able by improved tillage and larger farming to increase

the yield of the land. They could sell their produce more cheaply than the

yeomen, for whom nothing remained when his farm no longer supported him but

to sell it, procure a jenny or a loom, or take service as an agricultural

labourer in the employ of a large farmer. His inherited slowness and the

inefficient methods of cultivation bequeathed by his ancestors, and above

which he could not rise, left him no alternative when forced to compete with

men who managed their holdings on sounder principles and with all the

advantages bestowed by farming on a large scale and the investment of capital

for the improvement of the soil.

With these inventions, since improved

from year to year, the victory of

machine-work over hand-work in the

chief branches of English industry

was won; and the history of the

latter from that time forward simply

relates how the hand-workers have

been driven by machinery from one

position after another. The

consequences of this were, on the one

hand, a rapid fall in price of all

manufactured commodities, prosperity

of commerce and manufacture, the

conquest of nearly all the

unprotected foreign markets, the

sudden multiplication of capital and

national wealth; on the otherhand, a

still more rapid multiplication of

the proletariat, the destruction of

all property-holding and of all security of employment for the working-class,

demoralisation, political excitement, and all those facts so highly repugnant

to Englishmen in comfortable circumstances, which we shall have to consider

in the following pages. Having already seen what a transformation in the

social condition of the lower classes a single such clumsy machine as the

jenny had wrought, there is no cause for surprise as to that which a complete

and interdependent system of finely adjusted machinery has brought about,

machinery which receives raw material and turns out woven goods.

Such, in brief, is the history of English industrial development in the past

sixty years, a history which has no counterpart in the annals of humanity.

Sixty, eighty years ago, England was a country like every other, with small

towns, few and simple industries, and a thin but _proportionally_ large

agricultural population. To-day it is a country like _no_ other, with a

capital of two and a half million inhabitants; with vast manufacturing

cities; with an industry that supplies the world, and produces almost

everything by means of the most complex machinery; with an industrious,

Industrial Revolution factories spewing smoke

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intelligent, dense population, of which two-thirds are employed in trade and

commerce, and composed of classes wholly different; forming, in fact, with

other customs and other needs, a different nation from the England of those

days. The industrial revolution is of the same importance for England as the

political revolution for France, and the philosophical revolution for

Germany; and the difference between England in 1760 and in 1844 is at least

as great as that between France, under the _ancien regime_ and during the

revolution of July. But the mightiest result of this industrial

transformation is the English proletariat.

THE INDUSTRIAL PROLETARIAT.

It has been already suggested that manufacture centralises property in the

hands of the few. It requires large capital with which to erect the colossal

establishments that ruin the petty trading bourgeoisie and with which to

press into its service the forces of Nature, so driving the hand labour of

the independent workman out of the market. The division of labour, the

application of water and especially steam, and the application of machinery,

are the three great levers with which manufacture, since the middle of the

last century, has been busy putting the world out of joint. Manufacture, on

a small scale, created the middle-class; on a large scale, it created the

working-class, and raised the elect of the middle-class to the throne, but

only to overthrow them the more surely when the time comes. Meanwhile, it is

an undenied and easily explained fact that the numerous, petty middle-class

of the "good old times" has been annihilated by manufacture, and resolved

into rich capitalists on the one hand and poor workers on the other.

…

THE GREAT TOWNS.

After roaming the streets of the

capital a day or two, making headway

with difficulty through the human

turmoil and the endless lines of

vehicles, after visiting the slums of

the metropolis, one realises for the

first time that these Londoners have

been forced to sacrifice the best

qualities of their human nature, to

bring to pass all the marvels of

civilisation which crowd their city;

that a hundred powers which slumbered

within them have remained inactive,

have been suppressed in order that a

few might be developed more fully and

multiply through union with those of

others. The very turmoil of the

streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels.

The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other,

are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with

the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek

happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one

another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another,

and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of

the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it

occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal

indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes

the more repellant and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded

Victorian England street scene

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together, within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that

this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking is the fundamental

principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced,

so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. The

dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate

principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.

Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is

here openly declared. Just as in Stirner's recent book, people regard each

other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all

is, that the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that the powerful

few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak

many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.

…

… Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence

and production, is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried on,

it is clear that all the disadvantages of such a state must fall upon the

poor. For him no man has the slightest concern. Cast into the whirlpool, he

must struggle through as well as he can. If he is so happy as to find work,

_i.e_., if the bourgeoisie does him the favour to enrich itself by means of

him, wages await him which scarcely suffice to keep body and soul together;

if he can get no work he may steal, if he is not afraid of the police, or

starve, in which case the police will take care that he does so in a quiet

and inoffensive manner.

…

True, it is only individuals who starve,

but what security has the working-man that

it may not be his turn to-morrow? Who

assures him employment, who vouches for it

that, if for any reason or no reason his

lord and master discharges him to-morrow,

he can struggle along with those dependent

upon him, until he may find some one else

"to give him bread?" Who guarantees that

willingness to work shall suffice to

obtain work, that uprightness, industry,

thrift, and the rest of the virtues

recommended by the bourgeoisie, are really

his road to happiness? No one. He knows

that he has something

to-day, and that it does

not depend upon himself

whether he shall have

something to-morrow. He

knows that every breeze that blows, every whim of his

employer, every bad turn of trade may hurl him back into

the fierce whirlpool from which he has temporarily saved

himself, and in which it is hard and often impossible to

keep his head above water. He knows that, though he may

have the means of living to-day, it is very uncertain

whether he shall to-morrow.

Every great city has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded

together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces

of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it,

where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along

as it can.

Poor children and a dead horse on a street in 19th century England

Three poor, dirty, girls

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It is a disorderly collection of tall, three or four-storied houses, with

narrow, crooked, filthy streets, in which there is quite as much life as in

the great thoroughfares of the town, except that, here, people of the

working-class only are to be seen.

A vegetable market is held in the

street, baskets with vegetables and

fruits, naturally all bad and

hardly fit to use, obstruct the

sidewalk still further, and from

these, as well as from the fish-

dealers' stalls, arises a horrible

smell. The houses are occupied

from cellar to garret, filthy

within and without, and their

appearance is such that no human

being could possibly wish to live

in them. But all this is nothing

in comparison with the dwellings in

the narrow courts and alleys

between the streets, entered by

covered passages between the

houses, in which the filth and tottering ruin surpass all description.

Scarcely a whole window-pane can be found, the walls are crumbling, door-

posts and window-frames loose and broken, doors of old boards nailed

together, or altogether wanting in this

thieves' quarter, where no doors are

needed, there being nothing to steal.

Heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all

directions, and the foul liquids emptied

before the doors gather in stinking pools.

Here live the poorest of the poor, the

worst paid workers with thieves and the

victims of prostitution indiscriminately

huddled together, the majority Irish, or of

Irish extraction, and those who have not

yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin

which surrounds them, sinking daily deeper,

losing daily more and more of their power

to resist the demoralising influence of

want, filth, and evil surroundings.

Tenement fire escape and window crowded with children and mother

Crowded room in tenement

Crowded street scene with vegetable market

Tenement housing

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But in spite of all this, they who have some kind of a shelter are fortunate,

fortunate in comparison with the utterly homeless. In London fifty thousand

human beings get up every morning, not knowing where they are to lay their

heads at night. The luckiest of this multitude, those who succeed in keeping a

penny or two until evening, enter a lodging-house, such as abound in every

great city, where they find a bed. But what a bed! These houses are filled

with beds from cellar to garret, four, five, six beds in a room; as many as can

be crowded in. Into every bed four, five, or six human beings are piled, as

many as can be packed in, sick and well, young and old, drunk and sober, men

and women, just as they come, indiscriminately. Then come strife, blows,

wounds, or, if these bedfellows agree, so much the worse; thefts are arranged

and things done which our language, grown more humane than our deeds, refuses

to record. And those who cannot pay for such a refuge? They sleep where they

find a place, in passages, arcades, in corners where the police and the owners

leave them undisturbed. A few individuals find their way to the refuges which

are managed, here and there, by private charity, others sleep on the benches in

the parks close under the windows of Queen Victoria.

…

The habitual food of the individual working-man naturally varies according to

his wages. The better paid workers, especially those in whose families every

member is able to earn something, have good food as long as this state of

things lasts; meat daily, and bacon and cheese for supper. Where wages are

less, meat is used only two or three times a week, and the proportion of

bread and potatoes increases. Descending gradually, we find the animal food

reduced to a small piece of bacon cut up with the potatoes; lower still, even

this disappears, and there remain only bread, cheese, porridge, and potatoes,

until on the lowest round of the ladder, among the Irish, potatoes form the

sole food. As an accompaniment, weak tea, with perhaps a little sugar, milk,

or spirits, is universally drunk. Tea is regarded in England, and even in

Ireland, as quite as indispensable as coffee in Germany, and where no tea is

used, the bitterest poverty reigns. But all this pre-supposes that the

workman has work. When he has none, he is wholly at the mercy of accident,

and eats what is given him, what he can beg or steal. And, if he gets

nothing, he simply starves, as we have seen. The quantity of food varies, of

course, like its quality, according to the rate of wages, so that among ill-

paid workers, even if they have no large families, hunger prevails in spite

of full and regular work; and the number of the ill-paid is very large. …

COMPETITION.

We have seen in the introduction how competition created the proletariat at

the very beginning of the industrial movement, by increasing the wages of

weavers in consequence of the increased demand for woven goods, so inducing

the weaving peasants to abandon their farms and earn more money by devoting

themselves to their looms. We have seen how it crowded out the small farmers

by means of the large farm system, reduced them to the rank of proletarians,

and attracted them in part into the towns; how it further ruined the small

bourgeoisie in great measure and reduced its members also to the ranks of the

proletariat; how it centralised capital in the hands of the few, and

population in the great towns. Such are the various ways and means by which

competition, as it reached its full manifestation and free development in

modern industry, created and extended the proletariat. We shall now have to

observe its influence on the working-class already created. And here we must

begin by tracing the results of competition of single workers with one

another.

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Competition is the completest

expression of the battle of all

against all which rules in modern

civil society. This battle, a battle

for life, for existence, for

everything, in case of need a battle

of life and death, is fought not

between the different classes of

society only, but also between the

individual members of these classes.

Each is in the way of the other, and

each seeks to crowd out all who are in

his way, and to put himself in their

place. The workers are in constant

competition among themselves as the members of the bourgeoisie among

themselves. The power-loom weaver is in competition with the hand-loom

weaver, the unemployed or ill-paid hand-loom weaver with him who has work or

is better paid, each trying to supplant the other. But this competition of

the workers among themselves is the worst side of the present state of things

in its effect upon the worker, the sharpest weapon against the proletariat in

the hands of the bourgeoisie. Hence the effort of the workers to nullify

this competition by associations, hence the hatred of the bourgeoisie towards

these associations, and its triumph in every defeat which befalls them.

The proletarian is helpless; left to himself, he cannot live a single day.

The bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence in the

broadest sense of the word. What the proletarian needs, he can obtain only

from this bourgeoisie, which is protected in its monopoly by the power of the

State. The proletarian is, therefore, in law and in

fact, the slave of the bourgeoisie, which can decree his life or death.

It offers him the means of living, but only for an "equivalent" for his work.

It even lets him have the appearance of acting from a free choice, of making

a contract with free, unconstrained consent, as a responsible agent who has

attained his majority.

Fine freedom, where the proletarian has no other choice than that of either

accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offers him, or of starving, of

freezing to death, of sleeping naked among the beasts of the forests! A fine

"equivalent" valued at pleasure by the bourgeoisie! And if one proletarian

is such a fool as to starve rather than agree to the equitable propositions

of the bourgeoisie, his "natural superiors," another is easily found in his

place; there are proletarians enough in the world, and not all so insane as

to prefer dying to living.

Here we have the competition of the workers among themselves. If _all_the

proletarians announced their determination to starve rather than work for the

bourgeoisie, the latter would have to surrender its monopoly. But this is

not the case--is, indeed, a rather impossible case--so that the

bourgeoisie still thrives. To this competition of the worker there is but

one limit; no worker will work for less than he needs to subsist. If he must

starve, he will prefer to starve in idleness rather than in toil….

Crowd of laborers

10

From this it is evident what the minimum of wages is. The maximum is

determined by the competition of the bourgeoisie among themselves; for we

have seen how they, too, must compete

with each other. The bourgeois can

increase his capital only in commerce

and manufacture, and in both cases he

needs workers. Even if he invests his

capital at interest, he needs them

indirectly; for without commerce and

manufacture, no one would pay him

interest upon his capital, no one could

use it. So the bourgeois certainly

needs workers, not indeed for his

immediate living, for at need he could

consume his capital, but as we need an

article of trade or a beast of burden,--

as a means of profit. The proletarian

produces the goods which the bourgeois

sells with advantage. When, therefore,

the demand for these goods increases so

that all the competing working-men are

employed, and a few more might perhaps

be useful, the competition among the

workers falls away, and the bourgeoisie

begin to compete among themselves. The

capitalist in search of workmen knows

very well that his profits increase as

prices rise in consequence of the

increased demand for his goods, and pays

a trifle higher wages rather than let

the whole profit escape him….

From this we can determine the average

rate of wages. Under average

circumstances, when neither workers nor

capitalists have reason to compete,

especially among themselves, when there are just as many workers at hand as

can be employed in producing precisely the goods that are demanded, wages

stand a little above the minimum. How far they rise above the minimum will

depend upon the average needs and the grade of civilisation of the workers.

If the workers are accustomed to eat

meat several times in the week, the

capitalists must reconcile themselves to

paying wages enough to make this food

attainable, not less, because the

workers are not competing among

themselves and have no occasion to

content themselves with less; not more,

because the capitalists, in the absence

of competition among themselves, have no

occasion to attract working-men by

extraordinary favours. This standard of

the average needs and the average

civilisation of the workers has become

very complicated by reason of the

complications of English industry, and

is different for different sorts of

Children operating spinning machines in factory

Children and adults working in machine shop

Women working in factory

11

workers, as has been pointed out. Most industrial occupations demand a

certain skill and regularity, and for these qualities which involve a certain

grade of civilisation, the rate of wages must be such as to induce the worker

to acquire such skill and subject himself to such regularity. Hence it is

that the average wages of industrial workers are higher than those of mere

porters, day labourers, etc., higher especially than those of agricultural

labourers, a fact to which the additional cost of the necessities of life in

cities contributes somewhat. In other words, the worker is, in law and in

fact,the slave of the property-holding class, so effectually a slave that he

is sold like a piece of goods, rises and falls in value like a commodity. If

the demand for workers increases, the price of workers rises; if it falls,

their price falls. If it falls so greatly that a number of them become

unsaleable, if they are left in stock, they are simply left idle; and as they

cannot live upon that, they die of starvation. The bourgeoisie, on the other

hand, is far better off under the present arrangement than under the old

slave system; it can dismiss its employees at discretion without sacrificing

invested capital, and gets its work done much more cheaply than is possible

with slave labour, as Adam Smith comfortingly pointed out.

From this it is clear that English manufacture must have, at all times save

the brief periods of highest prosperity, an unemployed reserve army of

workers, in order to be able to produce the masses of goods required by the

market in the liveliest months. This reserve army is larger or smaller,

according as the state of the market occasions the employment of a larger or

smaller proportion of its members. This reserve army, which embraces an

immense multitude during the crisis and a large number during the period

which may be regarded as the average between the highest prosperity and the

crisis, is the "surplus population" of England, which keeps body and soul

together by begging, stealing, street-sweeping, collecting manure, pushing

handcarts, driving donkeys, peddling, or performing occasional small jobs.

In every great town a multitude of such people may be found.

RESULTS.

Having now investigated, somewhat in detail, the conditions under which the

English working-class lives, it is time to draw some further inferences from

the facts presented, and then to compare our inferences with the actual state

of things. Let us see what the workers themselves have become under the given

circumstances, what sort of people they are, what their physical, mental, and

moral status.

…

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that

death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in

advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when

society {95} places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they

inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as

much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives

thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which

they _cannot_ live--forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain

in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable

consequence--knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet

permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the

deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against

which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man

sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since

the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it

remains. I have now to prove that society in England daily and hourly

12

commits what the working-men's organs, with perfect correctness, characterise

as social murder, that it has placed the workers under conditions in which

they can neither retain health nor live long; that it undermines the vital

force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them to

the grave before their time. I have further to prove that society knows how

injurious such conditions are to the health and the life of the workers, and

yet does nothing to improve these conditions. That it _knows_ the

consequences of its deeds; that its act is, therefore, not mere manslaughter,

but murder, I shall have proved, when I cite official documents, reports of

Parliament and of the Government, in substantiation of my charge.

That a class which lives under the conditions

already sketched and is so ill-provided with

the most necessary means of subsistence, cannot

be healthy and can reach no advanced age, is

self-evident. Let us review the circumstances

once more with especial reference to the health

of the workers. The centralisation of

population in great cities exercises of itself

an unfavourable influence; the atmosphere of

London can never be so pure, so rich in oxygen,

as the air of the country; two and a half

million pairs of lungs, two hundred and fifty

thousand fires, crowded upon an area three to

four miles square, consume an enormous amount

of oxygen, which is replaced with difficulty,

because the method of building cities in itself

impedes ventilation. The carbonic acid gas,

engendered by respiration and fire, remains in

the streets by reason of its specific gravity,

and the chief air current passes over the roofs

of the city. The lungs of the inhabitants fail

to receive the due supply of oxygen, and the

consequence is mental and physical lassitude and low vitality. For this

reason, the dwellers in cities are far less exposed to acute, and especially

to inflammatory, affections than rural populations, who live in a free,

normal atmosphere; but they suffer the more from chronic affections. And if

life in large cities is, in itself, injurious to health, how great must be

the harmful influence of an abnormal atmosphere in the working-people's

quarters, where, as we have seen, everything combines to poison the air. In

the country, it may, perhaps, be comparatively innoxious to keep a dung-heap

adjoining one's dwelling, because the air has free ingress from all sides;

but in the midst of a large town, among closely built lanes and courts that

shut out all movement of the atmosphere, the case is different. All

putrefying vegetable and animal substances give off gases decidedly injurious

to health, and if these gases have no free way of escape, they inevitably

poison the atmosphere. The filth and stagnant pools of the working-people's

quarters in the great cities have, therefore, the worst effect upon the

public health, because they produce precisely those gases which engender

disease; so, too, the exhalations from contaminated streams. But this is by

no means all. The manner in which the great multitude of the poor is treated

by society today is revolting. They are drawn into the large cities where

they breathe a poorer atmosphere than in the country; they are relegated to

districts which, by reason of the method of construction, are worse

ventilated than any others; they are deprived of all means of cleanliness,

Smoke spewing from factory smoke stacks

13

of water itself, since pipes are

laid only when paid for, and the

rivers so means of cleanliness,

polluted that they are useless

for such purposes; they are

obliged to throw all offal and

garbage, all dirty water, often

all disgusting drainage and

excrement into the streets, being

without other means of disposing

of them; they are thus compelled

to infect the region of their own

dwellings. Nor is this enough.

All conceivable evils are heaped

upon the heads of the poor. If

the population of great cities is

too dense in general, it is they

in particular who are packed into

the least space. As though the vitiated atmosphere of the streets were not

enough, they are penned in dozens into single rooms, so that the air which

they breathe at night is enough in itself to stifle them. They are given damp

dwellings, cellar dens that are not waterproof from below or garrets that leak

from above. Their houses are so built that the clammy air cannot escape. They

are supplied bad, tattered, or rotten clothing, adulterated and indigestible

food. They are exposed to the most exciting changes of mental condition, the

most violent vibrations between hope and fear; they are hunted like game, and

not permitted to attain peace of mind and quiet enjoyment of life. They are

deprived of all enjoyments except that of sexual indulgence and drunkenness,

are worked every day to the point of complete exhaustion of their mental and

physical energies, and are thus constantly spurred on to the maddest excess in

the only two enjoyments at their command. And if they surmount all this, they

fall victims to want of work in a crisis when all the little is taken from

them that had hitherto been vouchsafed them.

…

Besides these, there are other influences which enfeeble the health of a

great number of workers, intemperance most of all. All possible temptations,

all allurements combine to bring the workers

to drunkenness. Liquor is almost their only

source of pleasure, and all things conspire

to make it accessible to them. The working-

man comes from his work tired, exhausted,

finds his home comfortless, damp, dirty,

repulsive; he has urgent need of recreation,

he must have something to make work worth

his trouble, to make the prospect of the

next day endurable. His unnerved,

uncomfortable, hypochondriac state of mind

and body arising from his unhealthy

condition, and especially from indigestion,

is aggravated beyond endurance by the

general conditions of his life, the

uncertainty of his existence, his dependence

upon all possible accidents and chances, and

his inability to do anything towards gaining an assured position. His

enfeebled frame, weakened by bad air and bad food, violently demands some

external stimulus; his social need can be gratified only in the public-house,

he has absolutely no other place where he can meet his friends. How can he be

Drawing of a worker enjoying a jug of an alcoholic drink

Polluted river near factory

14

expected to resist the temptation? It is morally and physically inevitable

that, under such circumstances, a very large number of working-men should

fall into intemperance.

…

The Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Working-Class contains

information which attests the same fact. In Liverpool, in 1840, the average

longevity of the upper classes, gentry, professional men, etc., was thirty-

five years; that of the business men and better-placed handicraftsmen,

twenty-two years; and that of the operatives, day-labourers, and serviceable

class in general, but fifteen years. The Parliamentary reports contain a mass

of similar facts.

The death-rate is kept so high chiefly by the heavy mortality among young

children in the working-class. The tender frame of a child is least able to

withstand the unfavourable influences of an inferior lot in life; the neglect

to which they are often subjected, when

both parents work or one is dead,

avenges itself promptly, and no one

need wonder that in Manchester,

according to the report last quoted,

more than fifty-seven per cent of the

children of the working-class perish

before the fifth year, while but twenty

per cent of the children of the higher

classes, and not quite. Thirty-two

percent of the children of all classes

in the country die under five years of

age…

So far has it gone in England; and the

bourgeoisie reads these things every

day in the newspapers and takes no

further trouble in the matter. But it

cannot complain if, after the official and non-official testimony here cited

which must be known to it, I broadly accuse it of social murder. Let the

ruling class see to it that these frightful conditions are ameliorated, or

let it surrender the administration of the common interests to the labouring-

class. To the latter course it is by no means inclined; for the former task,

so long as it remains the bourgeoisie crippled by bourgeois prejudice, it has

not the needed power. For if, at last, after hundreds of thousands of victims

have perished, it manifests some little anxiety for the future, passing a

"Metropolitan Buildings Act", under which the most unscrupulous overcrowding

of dwellings is to be, at least in some slight degree, restricted; if it

points with pride to measures which, far from attacking the root of the evil,

do not by any means meet the demands of the commonest sanitary police, it

cannot thus vindicate itself from the accusation. The English bourgeoisie has

but one choice, either to continue its rule under the unanswerable charge of

murder and in spite of this charge, or to abdicate in favour of the

labouring-class. Hitherto it has chosen the former course.

Let us turn from the physical to the mental state of the workers. Since the

bourgeoisie vouchsafes them only so much of life as is absolutely necessary,

we need not wonder that it bestows upon them only so much education as lies

in the interest of the bourgeoisie; and that, in truth, is not much. The

means of education in England are restricted out of all proportion to the

population. The few day schools at the command of the working-class are

available only for the smallest minority, and are bad besides. The teachers,

Homeless children from Victorian era, sleeping in stairway

15

Boy on factory floor

worn-out workers, and other unsuitable persons who only turn to teaching in

order to live, are usually without the indispensable elementary knowledge,

without the moral discipline so needful for the

teacher, and relieved of all public supervision.

Here, too, free competition rules, and, as

usual, the rich profit by it, and the poor, for

whom competition is not free, who have not the

knowledge needed to enable them to form a

correct judgment, have the evil consequences to

bear. Compulsory school attendance does not

exist. In the mills it is, as we shall see,

purely nominal; and when in the session of 1843

the Ministry was disposed to make this nominal

compulsion effective, the manufacturing

bourgeoisie opposed the measure with all its

might, though the working-class was outspokenly

in favour of compulsory school attendance.

Moreover, a mass of children work the whole week

through in the mills or at home, and therefore

cannot attend school. The evening schools,

supposed to be attended by children who are

employed during the day, are almost abandoned or

attended without benefit. It is asking too much,

that young workers, who have been using

themselves up twelve hours in the day, should go

to school from eight to ten at night. And those

who try it usually fall asleep, as is testified

by hundreds of witnesses in the Children's

Employment Commission's Report. Sunday schools have been founded, it is true,

but they, too, are most scantily supplied with teachers, and can be of use to

those only who have already learnt something in the day schools. The interval

from one Sunday to the next is too long for

an ignorant child to remember in the second

sitting what it learned in the first, a week

before. The Children's Employment

Commission's Report furnishes a hundred

proofs, and the Commission itself most

emphatically expresses the opinion, that

neither the week-day nor the Sunday schools,

in the least degree, meet the needs of the

nation. This Report gives evidence of

ignorance in the working-class of England,

such as could hardly be expected in Spain or

Italy. It cannot be otherwise; the

bourgeoisie has little to hope, and much to

fear, from the education of the working-

class. The Ministry, in its whole enormous

budget of £55,000,000, has only the single

trifling item of £40,000 for public

education, and, but for the fanaticism of the religious sects which does at

least as much harm as good, the means of education would be yet more scanty.

As it is, the State Church manages its national schools and the various sects

their sectarian schools for the sole purpose of keeping the children of the

brethren of the faith within the congregation, and of winning away a poor

childish soul here and there from some other sect. The consequence is that

religion, and precisely the most unprofitable side of religion, polemical

discussion, is made the principal subject of instruction, and the memory of

Clergyman from Victorian era

16

the children overburdened with incomprehensible dogmas and theological

distinctions; that sectarian hatred and bigotry are awakened as early as

possible, and all rational mental and moral training shamefully neglected.

The working-class has repeatedly demanded of Parliament a system of strictly

secular public education, leaving religion to the ministers of the sects;

but, thus far, no Ministry has been induced to grant it. The Minister is the

obedient servant of the bourgeoisie…

…

Thus are the workers cast out and ignored by the class in power, morally as

well as physically and mentally. The only provision made for them is the law,

which fastens upon them when they become obnoxious to the bourgeoisie. Like

the dullest of the brutes, they are treated to but one form of education, the

whip, in the shape of force, not convincing but intimidating. There is,

therefore, no cause for surprise if the workers, treated as brutes, actually

become such; or if they can maintain their consciousness of manhood only by

cherishing the most glowing hatred, the most unbroken inward rebellion

against the bourgeoisie in power. They are men so long only as they burn with

wrath against the reigning class. They become brutes the moment they bend in

patience under the yoke, and merely strive to make life endurable while

abandoning the effort to break the yoke.

This, then, is all that the bourgeoisie has done for the education of the

proletariat – and when we take into consideration all the circumstances in

which this class lives, we shall not think the worse of it for the resentment

which it cherishes against the ruling class. The

moral training which is not given to the worker in

school is not supplied by the other conditions of

his life; that moral training, at least, which

alone has worth in the eyes of the bourgeoisie; his

whole position and environment involves the

strongest temptation to immorality. He is poor,

life offers him no charm, almost every enjoyment is

denied him, the penalties of the law have no

further terrors for him; why should he restrain his

desires, why leave to the rich the enjoyment of his

birthright, why not seize a part of it for himself?

What inducement has the proletarian not to steal?

It is all very pretty and very agreeable to the ear

of the bourgeois to hear the "sacredness of

property" asserted; but for him who has none, the sacredness of property dies

out of itself. Money is the God of this world; the bourgeois takes the

proletarian's money from him and so makes a practical atheist of him. No

wonder, then, if the proletarian retains his atheism and no longer respects

the sacredness and power of the earthly God. And when the poverty of the

proletarian is intensified to the point of actual lack of the barest

necessaries of life, to want and hunger, the temptation to disregard all

social order does but gain power…Want leaves the working-man the choice

between starving slowly, killing himself speedily, or taking what he needs

where he finds it – in plain English, stealing. And there is no cause for

surprise that most of them prefer stealing to starvation and suicide.

True, there are, within the working-class, numbers too moral to steal even

when reduced to the utmost extremity, and these starve or commit suicide. For

suicide, formerly the enviable privilege of the upper classes, has become

fashionable among the English workers, and numbers of the poor kill

themselves to avoid the misery from which they see no other means of escape.

Drawing of police officer scuffling with crowd of working-class men

17

But far more demoralising than his poverty in its influence upon the English

working-man is the insecurity of his position, the necessity of living upon

wages from hand to mouth, that in short which makes a proletarian of him. The

smaller peasants in Germany are usually poor, and often suffer want, but they

are less at the mercy of accident, they have at least something secure. The

proletarian, who has nothing but his two hands, who consumes today what he

earned yesterday, who is subject to every possible chance, and has not the

slightest guarantee for being able to earn the barest necessities of life,

whom every crisis, every whim of his employer may deprive of bread, this

proletarian is placed in the most revolting, inhuman position conceivable for

a human being. The slave is assured of a bare livelihood by the self-interest

of his master, the serf has at least a scrap of land on which to live; each

has at worst a guarantee for life itself. But the proletarian must depend

upon himself alone, and is yet prevented from so applying his abilities as to

be able to rely upon them.

Everything that the

proletarian can do to improve

his position is but a drop in

the ocean compared with the

floods of varying chances to

which he is exposed, over

which he has not the slightest

control. He is the passive

subject of all possible

combinations of circumstances,

and must count himself

fortunate when he has saved

his life even for a short

time; and his character and

way of living are naturally

shaped by these conditions.

Either he seeks to keep his

head above water in this whirlpool, to rescue his manhood, and this he can do

solely in rebellion[20] against the class which plunders him so mercilessly

and then abandons him to his fate, which strives to hold him in this position

so demoralising to a human being; or he gives up the struggle against his

fate as hopeless, and strives to profit, so far as he can, by the most

favourable moment. To save is unavailing, for at the utmost he cannot save

more than suffices to sustain life for a short time, while if he falls out of

work, it is for no brief period. To accumulate lasting property for himself

is impossible; and if it were not, he would only cease to be a working-man

and another would take his place. What better thing can he do, then, when he

gets high wages, than live well upon them? The English bourgeoisie is

violently scandalised at the extravagant living of the workers when wages are

high; yet it is not only very natural but very sensible of them to enjoy life

when they can, instead of laying up treasures which are of no lasting use to

them, and which in the end moth and rust (i.e., the bourgeoisie) get

possession of…

…

Carlyle is perfectly right as to the facts and wrong only in censuring the

wild rage of the workers against the higher classes. This rage, this passion,

is rather the proof that the workers feel the inhumanity of their position,

that they refuse to be degraded to the level of brutes, and that they will

one day free themselves from servitude to the bourgeoisie. This may be seen

in the case of those who do not share this wrath; they either bow humbly

before the fate that overtakes them, live a respectful private life as well

as they can, do not concern themselves as to the course of public affairs,

Dejected men sitting on benches

18

help the bourgeoisie to forge the chains

of the workers yet more securely and stand

upon the plane of intellectual nullity

that prevailed before the industrial

period began; or they are tossed about by

fate, lose their moral hold upon

themselves as they have already lost their

economic hold, live along from day to day,

drink and fall into licentiousness; and in

both cases they are brutes. The last-named

class contributes chiefly to the "rapid

increase of vice", at which the

bourgeoisie' is so horrified after itself

setting in motion the causes which give

rise to it.

…

Another source of demoralisation among the

workers is their being condemned to work.

As voluntary, productive activity is the

highest enjoyment known to us, so is

compulsory toil the most cruel, degrading punishment. Nothing is more terrible

than being constrained to do some one thing every day from morning until night

against one's will. And the more a man the worker feels himself, the more

hateful must his work be to him, because he feels the constraint, the

aimlessness of it for himself. Why does he work? For love of work? From a

natural impulse? Not at all! He works for money, for a thing which has nothing

whatsoever to do with the work itself; and he works so long, moreover, and in

such unbroken monotony, that this alone must make his work a torture in the

first weeks if he has the least human feeling left. The division of labour has

multiplied the brutalising influences of forced work. In most branches the

worker's activity is reduced to some paltry, purely mechanical manipulation,

repeated minute after minute, unchanged year after year. {119} How much human

feeling, what abilities can a man retain in his thirtieth year, who has made

needle points or filed toothed wheels twelve hours every day from his early

childhood, living all the time under the conditions forced upon the English

proletarian? It is still the same thing since the introduction of steam. The

worker's activity is made easy, muscular effort is saved, but the work itself

becomes unmeaning and monotonous to the last degree. It offers no field for

mental activity, and claims just enough of his attention to keep him from

thinking of anything else. And a sentence to such work, to work which takes his

whole time for itself, leaving him scarcely time to eat and sleep, none for

physical exercise in the open air, or the enjoyment of Nature, much less for

mental activity, how can such a sentence help degrading a human being to the

level of a brute? Once more the worker must choose, must either surrender

himself to his fate, become a "good" workman, heed "faithfully" the interest of

the bourgeoisie, in which case he most certainly becomes a brute, or else he

must rebel, fight for his manhood to the last, and this he can only do in the

fight against the bourgeoisie.

…

And when all these conditions have engendered vast demoralisation among the

workers, a new influence is added to the old, to spread this degradation more

widely and carry it to the extremest point. This influence is the

centralisation of the population. The writers of the English bourgeoisie are

crying murder at the demoralising tendency of the great cities; like

perverted Jeremiahs, they sing dirges, not over the destruction, but the

growth of the cities. Sheriff Alison attributes almost everything, and Dr.

Vaughan, author of The Age of Great Cities, still more to this influence. And

Workers marching with sign reading: Work or Riot; One or the Other!

19

this is natural, for the propertied class has too direct an interest in the

other conditions which tend to destroy the worker body and soul. If they

should admit that poverty, insecurity, overwork, forced work, are the chief

ruinous influences, they would have to draw the conclusion, then let us give

the poor property, guarantee their subsistence, make laws against overwork,

and this the bourgeoisie dare not formulate. But the great cities have grown

up so spontaneously, the population has moved into them so wholly of its own

motion, and the inference that manufacture and the middle-class which profits

from it alone have created the cities is so remote, that it is extremely

convenient for the ruling class to ascribe all the evil to this apparently

unavoidable source; whereas the great cities really only secure a more rapid

and certain development for evils already existing in the germ. Alison is

humane enough to admit this; he is no thoroughbred Liberal manufacturer, but

only a half developed Tory bourgeois, and he has, therefore, an open eye, now

and then, where the full-fledged bourgeois is still stone blind…

…

“It is in the great cities that vice has spread her temptations, and pleasure

her seductions, and folly her allurements; that guilt is encouraged by the

hope of impunity, and idleness fostered by the frequency of example. It is to

these great marts of human corruption that the base and the profligate resort

from the simplicity of country life; it is here that they find victims

whereon to practise their iniquity, and gains to reward the dangers that

attend them. Virtue is here depressed from the obscurity in which it is

involved. Guilt is matured from the difficulty of its detection;

licentiousness is rewarded by the immediate enjoyment which it promises. If

any person will walk through St. Giles's, the crowded alleys of Dublin, or

the poorer quarters of Glasgow by night, he will meet with ample proof of

these observations; he will no longer wonder at the disorderly habits and

profligate enjoyments of the lower orders; his astonishment will be, not that

there is so much, but that there is so little crime in the world. The great

cause of human corruption in these crowded situations is the contagious

nature of bad example and the extreme difficulty of avoiding the seductions

of vice when they are brought into close and daily proximity with the younger

part of the people….”

…

If the centralisation of population stimulates and develops the property-

holding class, it forces the development of the workers yet more rapidly.

The workers begin to feel as a class, as a whole; they begin to perceive

that, though feeble as individuals, they form a power united; their

separation from the bourgeoisie, the development of views peculiar to the

workers and corresponding to their position in life, is fostered, the

consciousness of oppression awakens, and the workers attain social and

political importance. The great cities are the birthplaces of labour

movements; in them the workers first began to reflect upon their own

condition, and to struggle against it; in them the opposition between

proletariat and bourgeoisie first made itself manifest; from them proceeded

the Trades-Unions, Chartism, and Socialism. The great cities have transformed

the disease of the social body, which appears in chronic form in the country,

into an acute one, and so made manifest its real nature and the means of

curing it. Without the great cities and their forcing influence upon the

popular intelligence, the working-class would be far less advanced than it

is. Moreover, they have destroyed the last remnant of the patriarchal

relation between working-men and employers, a result to which manufacture on

a large scale has contributed by multiplying the employees dependent upon a

single employer. The bourgeoisie deplores all this, it is true, and has good

reason to do so; for, under the old conditions, the bourgeois was

comparatively secure against a revolt on the part of his hands. He could

20

tyrannise over them and plunder them to his heart's content, and yet receive

obedience, gratitude, and assent from these stupid people by bestowing a

trifle of patronising friendliness which cost him nothing, and perhaps some

paltry present, all apparently out of pure, self-sacrificing, uncalled-for

goodness of heart, but really not one-tenth part of his duty. As an

individual bourgeois, placed under conditions which he had not himself

created, he might do his duty at least in part; but, as a member of the

ruling class, which, by the mere fact of its ruling, is responsible for the

condition of the whole nation, he did nothing of what his position involved.

On the contrary, he plundered the whole nation for his own individual

advantage. In the patriarchal relation that hypocritically concealed the

slavery of the worker, the latter must have remained an intellectual zero,

totally ignorant of his own interest, a mere private individual. Only when

estranged from his employer, when convinced that the sole bond between

employer and employee is the bond of pecuniary profit, when the sentimental

bond between them, which stood not the slightest test, had wholly fallen

away, then only did the worker begin to recognise his own interests and

develop independently; then only did he cease to be the slave of the

bourgeoisie in his thoughts, feelings, and the expression of his will. And to

this end manufacture on a grand scale and in great cities has most largely

contributed.

…

In view of all this, it is not surprising that the working-class has

gradually become a race wholly apart from the English bourgeoisie. The

bourgeoisie has more in common with every other nation of the earth than with

the workers in whose midst it lives. The workers speak other dialects, have

other thoughts and ideals, other customs and moral principles, a different

religion and other politics than those of the bourgeoisie. Thus they are two

radically dissimilar nations, as unlike as difference of race could make

them, of whom we on the Continent have known but one, the bourgeoisie. Yet it

is precisely the other, the people, the proletariat, which is by far the more

important for the future of England.

…

In other ways, too, the humanity of the workers is constantly manifesting

itself pleasantly. They have experienced hard times themselves, and can

therefore feel for those in trouble, whence they are more approachable,

friendlier, and less greedy for money, though they need it far more than the

property-holding class. For them money is worth only what it will buy,

whereas for the bourgeois it has an especial inherent value, the value of a

god, and makes the bourgeois the mean, low money-grubber that he is. The

working-man who knows nothing of this feeling of reverence for money is

therefore less grasping than the bourgeois, whose whole activity is for the

purpose of gain, who sees in the accumulations of his money-bags the end and

aim of life. Hence the workman is much less prejudiced, has a clearer eye for

facts as they are than the bourgeois, and does not look at everything through

the spectacles of personal selfishness…

…

Thus the social order makes family life almost impossible for the worker. In

a comfortless, filthy house, hardly good enough for mere nightly shelter,

ill-furnished, often neither rain-tight nor warm, a foul atmosphere filling

rooms overcrowded with human beings, no domestic comfort is possible. The

husband works the whole day through, perhaps the wife also and the elder

children, all in different places; they meet night and morning only, all

under perpetual temptation to drink; what family life is possible under such

conditions? Yet the working-man cannot escape from the family, must live in

the family, and the consequence is a perpetual succession of family troubles,

domestic quarrels, most demoralising for parents and children alike. Neglect

21

of all domestic duties, neglect of the children, especially, is only too

common among the English working-people, and only too vigorously fostered by

the existing institutions of society. And children growing up in this savage

way, amidst these demoralising influences, are expected to turn out goody-

goody and moral in the end! Verily the requirements are naive, which the

self-satisfied bourgeois makes upon the working-man!

The contempt for the existing social order is most conspicuous in its extreme

form – that of offences against the law. If the influences demoralising to

the working-man act more powerfully, more concentratedly than usual, he

becomes an offender as certainly as water abandons the fluid for the vaporous

state at 80 degrees, Réaumur. Under the brutal and brutalising treatment of

the bourgeoisie, the working-man becomes precisely as much a thing without

volition as water, and is subject to the laws of Nature with precisely the

same necessity; at a certain point all freedom ceases. Hence with the

extension of the proletariat, crime has increased in England, and the British

nation has become the most criminal in the world….

The enemies are dividing gradually into two great camps – the bourgeoisie on

the one hand, the workers on the other. This war of each against all, of the

bourgeoisie against the proletariat, need cause us no surprise, for it is

only the logical sequel of the

principle involved in free

competition. But it may very well

surprise us that the bourgeoisie

remains so quiet and composed in

the face of the rapidly gathering

storm-clouds, that it can read

all these things daily in the

papers without, we will not say

indignation at such a social

condition, but fear of its

consequences, of a universal

outburst of that which manifests

itself symptomatically from day

to day in the form of crime. But

then it is the bourgeoisie, and

from its standpoint cannot even

see the facts, much less perceive their consequences. One thing only is

astounding, that class prejudice and preconceived opinions can hold a whole

class of human beings in such perfect, I might almost say, such mad

blindness. Meanwhile, the development of the nation goes its way whether the

bourgeoisie has eyes for it or not, and will surprise the property- holding

class one day with things not dreamed of in its philosophy.

Belligerent group of men and boys on street